Peter Carey's "Conversations with Unicorns":

Allegory, Metafiction and Parable

Didier Coste
Michel de Montaigne University, Bordeaux

And if they were able to converse with one another, would they not suppose
that they were naming what was actually before them?

Plato, Republic, Book VII

If Peter Carey is not often deemed a controversial writer, in spite of works

such as his mammoth picaresque satire Illywhacker, his bold rewriting of
Great Expectations in Jack Maggs, his apocryphal memoir of the popular
hero, the bushranger Ned Kelly, his intricate reworking of Jonathan Swift,
Laurence Sterne and Gnter Grass in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, and
his early cruel political short stories ( The Fat Man in History ), oscillating
between Ray Bradbury and George Orwell, with a touch of Philip K. Dick, it
may be precisely in part because his positions are to a certain extent protected
from a severe critique by the names of the Western elders and classics
involved in the stuff of his text. Such an involvement and embedding
automatically inscribe his narratives in the great tradition and standard
literary history (the same could apply to a large extent in the cases of John
Coetzee and Amitav Ghosh). But the doors to the canon may also be wide
open for several other strategic reasons that I would like to investigate
through a close reading of one short story, Conversations with Unicorns1
that has received comparatively little critical attention so far.
______________________________
1 It was originally published in Careys first collection, The Fat Man in History, University
of Queensland Press, and also in the now defunct Melbourne tabloid Sun News Pictorial. I

Didier Coste
The short story has been read as a fable: In labelling the beasts in this
animal fable unicorns, Carey moves the story away from conventional
realism and into a fabulist world of beasts that have long textual and mythic
histories but have left no other fossils2. I am afraid some unwanted
confusion may arise from the superposition of the two meanings of fable, as
tale in general, and comedy or farce in particular, on the one hand, and a
short narrative in prose or verse which points a moral3. The presentation of
human beings as animals is the characteristic of the literary fable [...]4. On
these grounds, it may be correct to classify Orwells Animal Farm as a fable,
but not Conversations: a) it does not convey a moral, let alone a clear cut
one expressed in the form of a proverb; b) the unicorns are not animals (they
do not belong to a world in which the categories human vs. non-human, or
animate vs. inanimate are valid), and fable animals, whether they are
European (the fox), African (the elephant), Asian or Australian (the kangaroo)
have not only left fossils, they are alive; and c) it is impossible to determine
whether, in Conversations, certain human beings are presented as nonhuman, or non-human creatures are presented as human5. Generic
indeterminacy is key to the interpretation of the so-called post-colonial text.
My special interest for this tale was first aroused a few years ago in the
framework of a long term research on the concept and history of
representation in literature, within successive and overlapping universes of
reference. As I used the tale repeatedly as an example of deliberately
_________________________________
___
use the text in Peter Careys Collected Stories, University of Queensland Press, 1994, p. 166170.
2 Anthony J. Hassall, Dancing on Hot Macadam: Peter Careys Fiction, 3rd, edition,
University of Queensland Press, 1998, p. 22.
3 J.A. Cuddon, A Dictionary of Literary Terms, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1979, p.
256.
4 Ibid.
5 I am most indebted to Prof. Xavier Pons, University of Toulouse-le-Mirail, for the final
touches to this paper, following a very stimulating discussion about the genre of Peter
Careys story.

 Conversations with Unicorns

enigmatic, Escherian conflict and confusion of universes of reference, the
embarrassingly puzzled smiles on my students faces came as a slow
revelation that there was more to it than a clever fantasy. It was not just
another case of one more turn of the screw; the more twists one gave to the all
too obvious constructive/deconstructive device, the more something
resisted its reduction to theoretical prowess and scholastic dexterity. What
was then that something? I shall submit, for a first working hypothesis in
this paper, that it may be not only a duality or plurality of worlds and
universes of reference, but the competition and stalemate of at least two
antagonistic but similar rhetorical structures facing the competent reader,
rather than the nave reader. Let us call them metafiction and allegory.
We shall try to see how the two at once inform and distort our hermeneutic
penetration of the tale and how they are linked to vastly different modes and
objects of reference. On the other hand, insofar as they can be reconciled, or
their contradictory implications somewhat subdued or tamed, we could make
a case for a kind of fragile and unstable balance in an array of
postcolonial, postmodern, post-phallic and post-totalitarian
narrations between commitment6 and scepticism, romantic enthusiasm and
a rationalistic, enlightened awareness of the limits of fictional and artistic
word power. Which would lead us to reconsider the fashionable gaping
discontinuities between modern and postmodern as well as between the
centre and the margins, all this in the interest of properly literary craft
and literary thought.

1 The unicorns dont understand, but who does?

A - Story line
______________________________
6 See my forthcoming Par-del lidentitaire: engagements romanesques indiens depuis
Tagore, in Littrature et engagement, Emmanuel Bouju, ed., Presses Universitaires de
Rennes, 2004.

Didier Coste
The main human character, an undescribed and unnamed male that we shall
call the narrator, because he tells the story, visits the unicorn community
twice. The unicorns live on a desolate moor; the females dwell miles apart
from the males in a different cave. Modern men have dug a long trench along
the ridge that separates the unicorn territory from the rest of the world. They
come with their cars and guns and shoot male unicorns when they run across
the moor to visit the females (unicorn heads are highly prized as trophies to
decorate the lounge rooms of rich industrialists). Unicorn hunters simply
remove the bodies of their preys as soon as they shoot them down. The
narrator wants to save unicorn lives by making them understand that they are
victims of mans cruelty: if they moved to some remote part of the moor, they
could easily be spared. But the unicorns believe that only God can kill, death
is a gift of God, and man, according to them, only fulfils his duty by
removing the bodies. On his first visit the narrator is accused of blasphemy,
he is hurt and badly bruised by some young unicorns. The hunters take him to
a hospital. On his second visit, he comes with a rifle, decided to drive his
point home. The unicorn leader, Moorav, thinks he is a mad man and tells
him: if you actually can kill with this instrument, do it to me. Moorav falls
dead. The unicorns are very sad because they have now lost their faith in God
and they will live for ever as in the old times, but in sadness. The old grand
priest asks the narrator to kill him. The narrator loads his gun. End of plot.
B - Story telling, loose ends
All the events narrated as well as character depiction, setting description,
explanations and value judgments, are summarily presented in testimonial
fashion by the single narrator-cum-human protagonist. All speech is presented
in the indirect mode: I say this..., they answer that. The narrator cannot be
said to be omniscient, since, as we shall see, he proves to have limited
access to the unicorns consciousness in terms of thought contents and mental
processes and only senses their feelings or infers them from their gestural
behaviour, tone of voice and facial expression. The implied audience is

 Conversations with Unicorns

human, not divine or unicornian: the audience is supposed to know not only
what a car, a wealthy industrialist, a seal or a firearm are like, their functions
and actions, but even taped ribs or a Lee Enfield .3037. The implied
shared knowledge of human narrator and human readers is considerable. I say
readers because the narrating tenses (present tense and present perfect) used
in the framing sections of the story, 1 and 5, are not mimetic of those of
traditional oral storytelling (preterit and imperfect, used only in the central
sections 2, 3 and 4), e.g., at the very end: I load the rifle, sadly. Inside the
cave the unicorns lie quietly..., so that the effect combines the characteristic
distanciation produced by a posteriori writing up with the mock presence,
simultaneity or immediacy and fast tempo of present tense narration.
The narrator is not omniscient, but he does not partake either of all the
knowledge he is supposed to possess. His partial ignorance is not
progressively compounded by full disclosure of what he actually knows, but,
on the contrary aggravated by voluntary or involuntary retention, to the point
of incompetence. An incompetence that eventually translates into blatant
contradiction or perhaps clumsy lying when the priest asserts that his people
will surely move to another part of the moor (in order to avoid death) and the
narrator finds them unaware that they will live for ever. The narrator, in the
first place, despite his objective material knowledge of what we know as the
real world, certified by scientific discourse of all kinds (sociological,
psychological, technological, historical, etc.), appears to believe firmly not
only in the actual existence of unicorns, but in their quality of sentient beings,
with an anthropomorphic psyche and intelligence, albeit limited, and even in
______________________________
7 Jay Currah, a retired Canadian officer, tells us that the Lee Enfield rifle, introduced in
1895, was the main military service rifle of the British Empire and her Commonwealth
countries for over 60 years [...]The .303 British round is more than just a military cartridge, it
is a symbol of a once great empire which for better than seventy years, the .303 helped build.
Between 1893 and 1914 the .303 established a remarkable reputation for deep penetration on
heavy African game [...] Due to the thousands of surplus Lee-Enfields in the U.S. and
throughout the world, the .303 British will remain a popular hunting cartridge for decades to
come. (from http://www.geocities.com/lee_enfield_rifles/ ) The rifle is thus strongly
associated, if not with a unique historical event, with colonial and capitalist warfare (notably
in Rhodesia and South Africa) as well as the destruction of wild species.

Didier Coste
their ability to speak a human language, English, presumably (since there is
no mention of semantic difficulties other than denotational). He is never
surprised that there are living unicorns and he can discuss hard facts and
metaphysical concepts with them. Neither are the unicorn hunters who pay
three thousand (British?) pounds for the stuffed head of a unicorn. Worse, if
possible, the narrator believes that unicorns are eternal by nature and would
live for ever if they were not slaughtered by man, but he never hints at the
eternity or not of man and beast in the presented world, and never questions
the rationale of sexual differentiation and reproductive behaviour in living
beings naturally meant to be eternal. Will eternal unicorns continue to mate ?
Isnt there a real danger of overpopulation in the future ? Many other
questions remain unanswered: are the female unicorns different from the male
? Namely, do they boast a horn or not ? Why does not the narrator visit them
also ? (He could try to make them persuade the males to be wiser.) What are
the feelings and beliefs of the females ? There are so many loose ends that the
demanding, serious reader could easily grow suspicious: are we being taken
for a ride, or is the narrator a madman, a mythomaniac ?
C - An impossible dialogue or a clear misunderstanding?
The utter absence of direct speech suggests both that free exchange between
the represented speakers is difficult, hampered by some reticence or noise
along the communication channel, and that the teller of the tale seeks to
acquire, exert and retain mastery over that verbal exchange (the subaltern
cannot and should not speak in our sense of the word). The obstacle to the
free flow of information and opinions between the parties is initially
represented as residing one-sidedly in the unicorns minds, unable and
probably unwilling to realize how they are victimized by man and grasp the
strategy proposed by the narrator to protect themselves against mans greed
and cruelty: The unicorns do not understand. / We have had long
conversations but it is difficult for them. Are such conversations real
conversations where and by which not only words but information, ideas
and feelings are brought together, poured, stirred and mixed in the same
bowl? Not quite, if the interlocutors are talking at cross purposes, do not share
the same object or the same point. Such exchanges are only conversations in
the formal, superficial sense whereby the phatic function prevails: just

 Conversations with Unicorns

talking. Can we speak then, of a dialogue? Maybe yes, but only if we
understand dia- in a divisive sense, stressing the boundary between the
speakers, the territorialisation of speech acts and their truth value (truth here,
non-truth there). Dialogue then, in the sense of amicably sharing a body of
discourse, is unfortunately impossible. According to the narrator, judge and
party to this case, the unicorns make it impossible, it is their fault because
they are stupid, stupid beyond redemption: their human friend has to save
them against their will, save them from their own stupidity, not only from the
hostile forces outside. The failure in communication, nevertheless, as it dawns
on us rather ominously after a while, is not the sole responsibility of the
unicorns: the militant, pedantic, propagandistic and self-congratulatory
discourse of the narrator fails because it is inappropriate, miscalculated, with
the wrong pragmatic orientation, and does not take into account profound
differences between his code and the addressees code. The tragic ironical
twist comes literally with a shock (and a bang) when the narrator tries to
justify his not engaging in calculations and slaughtering of Moorav, which
reduces the whole community of unicorns to silence: There was silence
behind me. No one spoke. The beautiful redundancy echoes the silencing of
speech by the power of gunpowder. Farewell to speech. The incident in itself,
as well as the complacent, stupid way in which it is told (very reminiscent
of Meursaults murder of the Arab in The Stranger) are metafictional selfdenunciations of the art of fiction. At the same time, when the rhetorical
device works, it is again in praise of the power of fiction after all.

2 Metafiction: the myth of the cave revisited

It is but logical and certainly inevitable that a fiction whose genesis can be
traced back to the reading and composite rewriting8 of one or more evident
______________________________
8 Rewriting is part and parcel of all literary history, but, just as parody, although it is not
necessarily parodical, it plays on the murky border between self and other.

Didier Coste
literary sources, will display other typical metafictional features, structures
and displacements of meaning.
A Paper creatures, fantasy and myth
Where do the unicorns belong? A facile and murky answer, the one given by
the so-called anthropology of Gilbert Durand and his school, would be: to the
imaginary and/or myth. On a textual basis, I would like to stress that, if the
imaginary is universal, Peter Careys unicorns should not be located and
parked as they are in a single spot of the presented world but rather scattered
all over it, unless their confinement in a kind of reserve or Unicornstan
means, rather crudely, the locus of the repressed in general. A psychoanalytic
approach could do better, considering that, in the story, unicorns are the only
known members of their class of fantastic composite creatures along with
chimeras, dragons, sphinxes and so on. To compare: in a Martian tale by Ray
Bradbury, all the remaining characters of great novels and plays are
eventually disposed of together and indiscriminately by the reigning Big
Brother, while, here, unicorns are not even one of a kind, but completely
singular, a hapax. They are not defined as horses or ponies with one long
horn, they are negatively situated as those creatures who are neither beasts
nor men nor gods, which makes them both similar to heroes and very
dissimilar insofar as heroes are also at one and the same time beasts, men and
gods. The products of imagination or the imaginary, as the standard
terminology shows it, are images, not necessarily moving images, let alone
images with a story or a history inscribed in them, travelling along time with
a narrative fate attached to them, that they must comply with. Peter Careys
unicorns are definitely more akin to the population of myth, epic and tragedy,
i.e. stories with a beginning, however dubious and remote, a definite and
striking middle life crisis, and an ending, however uncertain but necessary. If
I am prone to call them paper creatures, I mean by paper something like a
metaphor of discursive and storical memory, something that wants to be
reactivated in a certain order. The secondary reactivation, within a richly

 Conversations with Unicorns

intertextual text, of transitive, somehow changeable and perishable paper
creatures, is metafiction: a metaphor of fiction and more fiction, a plus to
fiction, the operation of the critically and narratively active mind bearing on
fiction and taking it beyond itself.9
Characteristic metafictional statements are not many in our story, although
most of the verba dicenda and literary terminology can come under the
double heading of plain factual narration and metalinguistic/metaliterary
comment or interpretation: I have suggested, When I return to the
subject, and I use his exact words, an old tale, in the story, I give as
examples, their legends, my dissertation on the crimes of men, etc. All
those instances are possible but not compulsory descriptions of what is going
on in the telling and writing of our present story. Deceptively nave10 as
they are, they pervade, complement and disturb the story with a fairly dense
smattering of mentions of story-telling. In other words, the narrative is not
only about events, characters, passions and moral values, it is also about
words, their use, their revealing and misleading power, their vagueness and
other deficiencies. One could object that all tales are metafictional and
autotelic to a certain extent, that it is in the nature of the poetic function, but
the density and narrative programming role (the proairetic function) of selfreflexive occurrences, direct and indirect, are undoubtedly well above the
qualitative threshold that separates metafiction from plain straightforward
story-telling.
Now, although metafiction is reputed to develop and proliferate much more in
certain ideological and aesthetic periods than others, for example more in
transition and critical moments, in nascent, baroque and decadent
synchronies than in classical, stable institutional times, it is nevertheless
______________________________
9 I accept as basically correct the following definition: Metafiction is a term given to
fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an
artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality (Patricia
Waugh, Metafiction, London, Methuen, New Accents, 1984, p. 2).
10 Patricia Waugh, ibid.

Didier Coste
largely transhistoric and not much more historically significant than other
symptoms, never univocal or self-sufficient, to be interpreted in the
framework of a system or syndrome, along with other indexical signs. The
intemporal leaning of metafiction is obvious in canonical texts of the genre
such as Nabokovs Ada11, and further evidence is provided here by the
recycling and reworking, in the old tale and the present condition of the
unicorns, of Platos myth of the cave.
B Did Platos prisoners have a horn?
The unicorns live in a cave (actually, in two caves, but we shall know nothing
else about the females of the species, or the babies and young: for example,
when and how are the pubescent males transferred from their mothers to
their fathers lodgings? When and how are they initiated to the rites they will
have to perform as adults? Why are they not shot by evil hunters as they cross
the moor?). The story spatially centres on the male cave, homogeneously
populated12, and whose population is simply and loosely organised along a
hierarchy of age groups and two functions: priestly and civil. Artificial
lighting is not mentioned, the cave is therefore, like us, left more in the dark
than it is enlightened. We can presume that the only source of light is sunlight
parsimoniously entering the cave through its doorless entrance.
Unicorns never die in the caves, it has always been the case. While they stay
in the caves, nothing ever changes for them. But, for them, the world they
contemplate is a world of eternal, pure ideas. Only one thing (repeatedly)
happens: a hard encounter with body life in the form of sudden death, that
brings no teaching, no knowledge of the wider world, when they leave their
cave, in between caves. Strangely enough, they feed on wild honey, brown
______________________________
11 When events which are looked forward to on the level of the histoire have already been
narrated by the discours, then history becomes a non-category, and past and future in novels
is shown yo be merely (on one level) the before and after of the order of narration. (Patricia
Waugh, Metafiction, op. cit., p. 71.
12 The exclusion of the female Other from the discourse of Western philosophy has been
often commented, particularly in the wake of Luce Irigarays rereading of the myth of the
cave in Speculum of the Other Woman (1974).

10

 Conversations with Unicorns

bread, and milk, all food products that cannot be grown or collected in a dark
cave populated with male beings. That food the favourite fare of fairy tale
characters lost in the forest is produced from nowhere when it is offered to
the narrator,. We should understand that, albeit their appearance in strong,
heavy, well built, material bodies, the unicorns are symbolically nurtured by
their own nature of peaceful, contemplative and god-loving creatures.
Contrary to the suffering of Platos prisoners13, the slaves of shadows of
ideas, the unicorns in their cave are quiet, untormented souls absorbed in the
god-given nature of things, as unchanging as concepts. Their blessed
ignorance is in the nature of things that is in accordance with appearances and
ideas within the perimeter of the unicorns destinies. In other words, myth is
an environment which makes no difference between substance and essence:
the shocking indifference of the unicorns is monism before the fall.
Concepts cannot ask themselves whether they are true and real, or fake and
mere illusions. The narrator (and, for us, his disturbing revelations) is the
one actor who upsets the perennial order of the cave by doing violence to
unicorns and readers fond of myth and fantasy, forcing doubts and
questions on them. In the world of unicorns and gullible contemplative
readers, there is no point to worryingly questioning eternal truths confirmed
by age-old, daily, unalterable, never disproved experience. For the narrator
and his tale, on the other hand, nothing is timeless, concepts and facts, beliefs
and matter must be dissociated. The narrator has come to break repetition, to
restore time and abolish timelessness14 by making visible the rifle of Empire,
revealing its action on the bodies and the effectiveness of words that go with
it. The unique, non-iterative narrative can and must, according to him, be
______________________________
13 Their unreason is presented by Plato (from outside) as a malady, whose cure would also
be painful.
14 One of the sources very obviously reworked in the short story is Peter S. Beagles The
Last Unicorn (1968). In that fantasy novel, the lone unicorn is attracted outside her forest
abode when she overhears a conversation between some hunters who wonder whether there
are still unicorns alive. She sets out on an adventure to discover whether it is true that she is
the last unicorn. The title of that source leads to a further intertextual, interpretive link with
The Last of the Mohicans.

11

Didier Coste
interpreted as the irruption of history into myth. Are the presuppositions that
allow such interpretation right? And what history is that? Will he, does he
succeed? Exit metafiction, which works in a world of text15, in a world of
words only, enters allegory, which parallels and confronts to the text a nontextual, supposedly material and factual world, independent from any
representation. Careys narrator-cum-activist could be a modern version of
Platos figure of the philosopher (earthly material realities now playing the
role of the philosophers horizon). It would be no wonder that Careys
narrator, just as Platos philosopher and Beagles magician Schmendrick,
should prove to be inept or even dangerous in the world of unicorns.16

3 An Australian allegory ?

It is about time we remembered Peter Carey is a contemporary Australian

writer, not a pure idea of a writer, although he was born in Bacchus Marsh, a
place whose name seems borrowed from some Surrealist dictionary of
myth17. We are now willing to consider that he has later written many novels
and one diary/essay which deal explicitly with Australian characters,
landscapes, cities and ways of life, Australian history and economy,
Australian ideas, beliefs, hopes and prejudice. Shifting focus accordingly, we
shall suppose that our early short story can at least allude to Australian items,
and a prehistoric, transported population that has just managed to survive the
acts of God and the vile, predatory, destructive actions unleashed by man
against them and nature, may bear some resemblance to the aboriginal people
______________________________
15 understood, not as a particular textual unit but as a potentially infinite network of
intertextually prompted textual constellations, all incomplete by themselves.
16 And is there anything surprising in one who passes from divine contemplations to the
evil state of man, misbehaving himself in a ridiculous manner? (Plato, Republic, Book VII)
17 History is even more surreal, the town being named after a Captain William Henry
Bacchus (of Van Diemen's Land).

12

 Conversations with Unicorns

of Australia and their sad, resigned condition18 in the 150 years elapsed
between their virtual extermination and the recent, belated revival of
militancy in their favour by mainly white or mixed-blood activists, leading to
a revaluation of their customs, wisdom, languages and arts, to land-rights
claims and some protective measures against racial violence, degradation and
self-destruction.
A - On the origin of the Aboriginal people
Allegory is overdetermined, being at least and indistinctively three different
things at once: a figure of speech, a figure of thought and a narrative
structure. Moreover there is nothing against allegory being logically
unsustainable.
As a figure of speech operating at word level19, there would be little
difference between allegory and metaphor, in the sense that the former has the
same basic semantic structure as the latter, a structure in which the figure of
thought and the subsequent narrative structure are formally grounded. If one
calls unicorns the Aborigines of Australia, there is no formal difference
with calling Aborigines the unicorns: the displacement of the signifier and
the connotative emphasis are symmetrical. As a figure of thought, allegory
gives a concrete and material appearance to an abstract entity (moral, mental
or conceptual), this is why it is often confused in our minds and in the lexicon
of art history and criticism with personification, as when we say that the old
masters painted allegories of faith, reason or evil. We should notice that, if
painting the Aborigines as unicorns is an allegory, it then implies,
surprisingly, that the Aborigines are abstract, originally invisible, bodiless
entities, while unicorns would be essentially visible images, corporeal
entities. As a figure of thought, the upsetting of the horizon of expectation by
______________________________
18 as conveniently viewed by the White folks, their existence being mystified into myth and
their history into dream.
19 It was always doubtful, even for Quintilian, that allegory can (be) operate(d) at this level ;
it is now generally accepted that it cannot, unless allegoresis is derived from a macrocontext,
such as the one provided by our short story.

13

Didier Coste
the present allegory works as an eye-opener on the invisibility of Aborigines
for the Whites, their hiding away in an inner world of their own, and so on.
As a narrative structure, extended or fully developed allegory is a variety of
parallel: parallel stories, one of abstractions and one of physical entities, are
told in such a way that a lesson is drawn from the physical world to be
applied to the moral world and analogically support a truth that could
otherwise remain undemonstrated, insufficiently demonstrated or simply
tentative. The inversion of abstract and physical entities in the present
allegory (an inversion that remains however subject to the temptation of
reversion or under its threat), this inversion seeks support for the whole truth
about Aboriginal people in our empirical knowledge of unicorns. Our
knowledge of unicorns, though, can be considered empirical only in a paper
world peopled with paper characters, in a world of texts, that is in
metafictional space: in spite of its deep differences with metafiction, allegory,
here, is rooted in metafiction. Once again the aboriginal people appear to be
caught between the two opposite values of the preposition ab: from,
rooting them securely in eternity, and without, depriving them of any
beginning or grounding.
B - A dreamtime for unicorns?
At this stage, the modern political/historical, use of the allegorical device
invites us to reinterpret the metaphysical/metafictional theme of Platos cave
in a way that brings it out of a closed (metaphysical) world of texts, logos,
ideas, into the real, material, physical world, in the full crude light of real life,
where both joy and suffering are lived intensely. What did the chained
prisoners in the cave, Platos powerless victims feel? A question rarely asked
indeed, which re-emerges only in another myth, the Sisyphus myth; but in the
latter, the plight of man is made heroic by the loneliness and individuality of
the victim.
Whereas Platos slaves are lured by the mere shadows of phenomenal
substance which hide the idea from their scrutiny, and their philosophical
puppeteer yearns for the invisible essence of things that would be pure and
perfect if they were not obscenely disguised as images of matter, Peter
Careys unicorns continue to give full credit to what appears on mental screen
in their dark chambers, and very little to the goings on of the outer world.

14

 Conversations with Unicorns

Inverted allegory makes for inverted temporal orientation: Platos people
mistake the flickering dark pictures of the appearance of things for eternal
ideas; Careys unicorn people, in the dark light of their all but forgotten myth
of origin, mistake the gift of death for a rebirth, a new foundation, the
institution of an alternative eternity by the repetition of an ending. With their
migration from hot to cold, from godless, deathless state to fertile mortality
they have brought their dreamtime in their scant luggage and only
superficially altered it to fit a new god-given condition, a new climate. This
inappropriate behaviour is seen by the narrator as a regrettable, endangering,
self-damaging error: the unicorns must come back to their senses, even if they
have never been there, they must be awakened to the possibility of diving
through the loopholes of the waste land in order to happily return to the
neverland of timelessness, before not beyond any possible beginning of time,
before the institution of repetition, that simulacrum of time20. In other terms,
their saviour will cunningly show them the way to the last frontier, a place
where they can be forgotten and effaced from history instead of being effaced
from the living.
C - Good intentions, good conscience and the unforgivable
The narrator thus displays all the features of those white activists who fail to
realize or hypocritically deny that their solution to being pestered by guilt is
to remove the embarrassing victim from the stage, from their field of vision.
That ludicrous solution is nothing but another final solution. The narrator,
unlike the hunters, does not remove the dead bodies of the unicorns, he
removes their living bodies, which may be worse. It becomes possible
therefore to consider two ideological interpretations, or, if one prefers,
______________________________
20 Graham Huggan states that Careys fictions are suffused with, sometimes paralysed by,
nostalgia; their vision of the future often involve the return to an idealised past. (Peter
Carey, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, Australian Writers, 1996, p. 64.) But he also
notes: The horror of repetition is often documented with excruciating detail. [...] This
torment is repeated for those who wish to die but are unable, such as the unicorns, from
whom the precious gift of death has been withheld. The unicorns, like the fat men in the
collections title story, represent a closed society, unable either to escape its past or to
transform its future. (ibid., p. 65)

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Didier Coste
political readings of Peter Careys critical stance with regards to his narrator
and main character. Should there be no further irony, a clear verdict of guilty
is issued against him, without any extenuating circumstances; the supposed
stupidity and backwardness of the unicorns is a thin cover up for the
narrators own ignorance and complacency, his contempt of transhistoric
human values and the symbolic order, his misplaced, unwanted pity, his
perfunctory regrets (I had to do it, I am sorry the whole world forced me to
do it.) But, should there be further irony (one or more additional ironical
twists), a likely development, due to the spiral of metafictional/allegorical
escalation, we shall notice in many textual details a measure of intended
confusion between the figure of the unnamed narrator and an authorial figure.
After all, both belong to a powerfully modern, imperial civilization which
still represses, suppresses, exploits and slowly destroys the remnants of an
older, traditional people. Both of them encounter difficulties to communicate
with their respective addressees, in spite of boasting of knowing more and
better than them. Both of them appropriate the lost memory of the Other and
tell him/her what he should know about his/her past, acting as a ruthless
psychoanalyst. Both of them conceal or at least omit several important pieces
of information (that would help the said addressees understand the logic
behind the scenes and therefore pass well-grounded critical judgments). If the
narrator, then, fails in his Greenpeacelike endeavour to save primitive,
innocent men an invaluable part of Wild Life heritage, along with their
ancestral knowledge, justify their claim to wisdom and help them survive in
hedonistic joy rather than grey depression and fatalism, does the author also
fail in his purpose? And, if he does fail, was his real purpose so different from
the narrators? Moreover, how is it that the narrator, just like a conventional
author figure, lives in a mental ivory tower? Is it self-denunciation on the part
of the writer, or can this self-denunciation be ironical in the sense that it
would mock all such clichd attitudes? It is well known that pervasive irony
is never self-defeating for the authorial figure, since its success is a matter of
who has the last word.

Inconclusions: Let those who can, understand: a parable of

historical indeterminacy

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 Conversations with Unicorns

To summarize, our short story is doubly and concurrently informed by the

rhetoric of metafiction and the rhetoric of allegory, with very similar
structures but widely different anchorings, frames and objects of reference.
Metafiction is concerned with texts within the text and the expansion and
dissemination of the text into its own galaxy, if possible; metafiction is about
meaning, but, according to it, meaning is not about the outside world, the
empirical world, it happens within the (expandable) textual set considered, it
is about how the mind does games with words, which is why metafiction
operates mostly through wordplay, allusion, double-entente, dej-vu and
unheimlich. Allegory, on the other hand, takes a very different view of
meaning, according to which its flow does not rely on or aim at internal
communication and translation, but derives from and seeks to produce with
signs a representation of the material and experiential world, build a model of
it and for it. Both myth and metafiction are really monistic at opposite ends of
the historical spectrum; but allegory is dualistic, which is why, with it, the
roles of concrete and abstract, physical and metaphysical, nature and artefact,
and so on, are clearly symmetrical and can be easily exchanged or inverted.
Allegory can maintain a degree of ambiguity, but the ease with which it
translates world into words and, reciprocally, words into world, also displays
a great deal of persuasive power to turn propositional meaning into Cartesian
evidence or visibility. With metafiction, we can give a go to any meaning
or lack of meaning; with allegory there is always a nature of things and a
meaningful goal: finding about and complying with the nature of things, to
which the nature of signs is supposed to be basically faithful. Metafiction, it
does not come as a surprise, is Saussurian and anagrammatic; allegory is
rather Cratylian. Metafiction defamiliarizes and familiarizes by turns, only to
defamiliarize and above all disconcert more; allegory is content with
revealing and familiarizing only, it does its best to produce recognition and
confirmation (anagnoresis), the homely, through repetition, training,
conditioning. When allegory and metafiction meet and compete in the
complex set of acts of communication that all modern fictional texts are, one
of the two must prevail in the end, unless there is no proper ending and the

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Didier Coste
screen goes dark without the beholder being able to ever guess what is going
to happen next, let alone how it will all end.
I submit that the abrupt interruption of the story line is not intended to be
simply dramatic, it is meant to raise the level of the debate between
metafiction and allegory, the gratuitous and the purposeful, the playful and
the earnest, to a higher plane: confer it the dignity of perpetual questioning
and meditation, the grand humility and wisdom of a wise man confessing his
ignorance. When metafiction and allegory cannot proceed any further in their
struggle for power, the parable comes in: let him who can, understand! We
return to the cave as the eternal site of eternal mystery; in the cave the secrets
of the past and the future will remain buried for ever; we will for ever brush
against them without suspecting that they are so close to us, about to be
revealed, on the tip of the tongue. The beauty and the danger of Peter Careys
final suspension of belief consist in the superposition and reconciliation of
metaphysical and historical questions such as: where are we coming from?
who are we? where are we going? Questions about which we always say that
the future will tell. The future will tell, not the storyteller, if there is a
future, although a storyteller was here and wrote it on the walls of the cave21.

______________________________
21 Similarly, according to an interview quoted on the occasion of his recent invitation at the
University of Kentucky, Peter Beagle said he really did not know what particular message
the book [The Last Unicorn] presents that has given it such a lasting quality and caused it to
be translated into 20 languages: People see so much what they want to see some just see a
mare in the story and not a unicorn.
(from http://www.uky.edu/PR/News/Archives/2003/April2003/03-04_Last_Unicorn.htm)

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